Guwahati: An Indian wristspinner working his way through a strong batting lineup on a good batting pitch on Day One of a Test match — the idea seems a page out of a long-forgotten novel we once cherished. In an age of raging turners where pitching the ball in the right areas gets you wickets, Kuldeep Yadav’s performance (3-48) seemed like a breath of fresh air. The left-arm wrist spinner, since his debut in Dharamshala against Australia in a must-win Test in 2017, hasn’t always won the team management’s confidence to get a look into the first XI. Yet, whenever the chances have come, he has delivered. Three wickets for the day isn’t the greatest of returns if you go by the volume of wickets the fingers have got on Indian tracks over the last few years. But on Saturday, Kuldeep brought back memories of the art of guile, drift, and deception that once used to be part of Indian Test cricket.
In 13 Tests that the left-arm wrist spinner has played in India, he has taken 57 wickets at a terrific average of 21.60. In the four that he has played away, the average is an even healthier 19.55, but all that he has got in eight years is 17 Tests.Anil Kumble, under whose coaching Kuldeep made his Test debut, beautifully explains why the left-arm spinner looked so good on a pitch where batting wasn’t very difficult. “On red-soil pitches like this one, Kuldeep generates bounce and gets the ball to go a little faster off the pitch. On black-soil pitches, the ball sometimes tends to go a little slower off the surface and Kuldeep ends up trying too hard to bowl faster. That sometimes leads to erring in length,” the master leg-spinner with 619 Test wickets said. Indian fielding coach Ryan ten Doeschate too underlined Kumble’s point, saying that “with a little more pace in the wicket, Kuldeep is slightly more effective in conditions like these. The finger spinners are going to come into it later on in the game. But certainly, in terms of strategy and how we wanted to set up the first day, it’s a real bonus for Kuldeep to get us a foothold,” ten Doeschate said. While Kuldeep had Ryan Rickelton nicking with a googly that left him, he induced a false shot off Wiaan Mulder with one that dipped on him. But the best of the day for Kuldeep was definitely the Tristan Stubbs wicket. The right-hander was well-settled, and Kuldeep got his drift going immediately when he came back for his new spell. Stubbs, looking for his half-century, nicked him to first slip. “It was definitely a better pitch than Eden. For Kuldeep to get a wicket, he had to get his drift going,” Stubbs said.
